Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2020 - Student interview - 05. Max Russell

[music playing]

MAX RUSSELL: Hi. My name is Max Russell, and I studied visual arts at Reddam House, Sydney in NSW. My work is about the concept of surveillance and digital identity.

In this new age, and you know with technology, we've got these whole new digital identities, which are separate from our own identities. And, that's kind of separating a lot. And, how we see ourselves online is very different to how we see ourselves in person.

And so, a lot of my work is about, it's got figures who are representatives of surveillance. And, how they can watch us through technology, because we're aware of this surveillance everywhere. And, we keep learning about it.

But, the threat is that we don't care. And, I think that's the biggest problem. We just carry on with our lives without thinking about it.

I got pretty interested in image manipulation using a camera, and then changing and transforming the images into these digital representations. I just love the idea of this interactive work, like pushing the boundaries between the artist and the viewer, and making that connection.

My body of work had a lot of challenges along the way. First of all, I had to learn this entirely new language just even to produce my work. Even if everything works theoretically, in practice it's a lot different. And so, a lot of the time, things just don't work, and you don't know why. And, you spend maybe like 30 hours just trying to fix a single thing. And, you don't even know what's wrong.

And, an example of that is just the final hurdle that I couldn't get over in the end. And, that was converting this programme into an executable file. There is this one artist, Ryoji Ikeda, and he does these large scale digital interactive art works. And, it's all black and white, binary colours, just black and white. There's something about it, just the interactive process.

He brought in this mathematical side of his life, something so different to art, just completely different. And, he somehow rolled that into the art world. And, that provides a unique perspective.

Like look for other things you can bring into your art, to make it unique and stand out from others. Because there's going to be a tonne of photorealistic charcoal drawings, right? If you have any other assets you can bring into your art, that could make it so much more interesting, and special, and stand out from the crowd.

So, basically, this is the program that I wrote in Python. That's the language I wrote it in. And, basically what the program does is it uses the camera, and it takes images from that camera, and it runs it through a bunch of processes, and then spits out an image back at you.

So, I'm just going to start this program now. There we go. So, we start, and this is Phase 1. So, as you can see, the resolution is actually increasing, and the image is getting more and more detailed. As you're watching it, you actually come to realise that it's actually a mirror. You actually see yourself on the screen.

And so, what it's doing is it's taking the brightness value of each image, taken from the camera. It's taking each brightness value and converting that into a character, which is like the larger character, as you can imagine, the brighter it's going to be. And, the smaller the character, the darker it's going to be.

And, so this is Phase 2 here. As you can see, there's text on the screen. It's coming across. It actually changes with each cycle. This is going to be a different set of words. This one says, 'you cannot hide.' And you can see it kind of goes into brightness, and all the characters kind of eat you up. And then it fades to black.

So, here it forms a kind of animation. And, I actually created an animation. And, it morphs through different figures associated with surveillance, not necessarily bad figures. It's got people like Putin. Here's the president of China. Stalin. It's got even like the CEO of Google and such. Not necessarily bad people, but people associated with surveillance.

And, as you can see, it actually uses face tracking. And so, as I move from right to left, the eyes are actually following me up and down. Here's face forward now. Everything is going by so quick.

So, here it's creating an image of me out of images of other people. And so, that's talking about collective identity, and how everything's all muddled together in the technological world. So, art is a study of different trains of thought, and try and like open your mind and see different ways of thinking.

And, right now I'm studying architecture at uni. And, I think of that as a compromise with math and art. And so, I think it's really interesting how all the things I'm studying in architecture are the same things I'm studying in art. And, with architecture, it's so important to try to stand out, once again, just like in art. And studying art has helped me with that process.